Patients prescribed drugs
tested on animals should be told details of exactly what it involved,
including any suffering caused, say some of the world's leading animal
ethicists.

The editors of the Journal of Animal Ethics (JAE),
published this month by the University of Illinois Press, want full
disclosure on the nature of testing used in drug development. They say
people should know "not only whether animals were used, but also what
kind, how many were used, the precise procedures to which they were
subject, and the nature and severity of the pain and suffering, if any,
that they had to endure."

The editors point to the comments of Lord
Robert Winston, the famous pioneer of fertility treatment, in a debate on
animal experiments in the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. Lord
Winston stated: "I do not think we can argue that there is any substitute
for animal research. Of course, reduction is possible but I do not think
that substitution is . We need to say very clearly that it would be
unthinkable to take any drug which has not been tested on an intact
animal. In fact, there is a case for having legislation to make it clear
that a particular drug has only been possible for human consumption
because of animal testing. This could be stamped on the packet, rather
like a cigarette packet."1

However, they consider Lord Winston's
proposal too modest: "Animals are subject to a whole range of uses in
laboratories from the routine testing of household products, cosmetics
(though some limitations have been placed on this in Europe) including
the testing of agricultural products, poisons, sprays and herbicides,
even fire-extinguisher substances. And that doesn't include the use of
animals in military experiments. If full disclosure, based on the right
to know, is the position of animal researchers, and they have nothing to
hide, there can be no grounds for postulating that only medical products
should be singled out. Let us know all the details, the benefits (if any)
and also the costs to the animals themselves."

In the editorial the
authors also call for information about "the way in which some animal
experiments lead to no worthwhile discovery, those experiments that have
impeded medical progress, even how many animal-tested drugs have been
recalled after harming humans." The editors ask whether we should not all
have the right to know "about the experiments on human animals that have
also, directly or indirectly, contributed to the increase of scientific
knowledge as well as drugs and vaccines?"

They suggest that Lord
Winston may "have overlooked the long history of experiments on human
subjects, including prisoners of war, enlisted soldiers, people of color,
and the mentally challenged. Have these contributed nothing to medical
advances? To take just one example, what of the early clinical trials of
tuberculin treatments on orphan children ("intact [human] animals") that
took place in Philadelphia in 1908?"2

They call for a full
disclosure: "Yes, let there be disclosure. Let the facts and the history
be known. Let us not shirk the details. Anything less may serve
particular interests but is less than the full disclosure we have a right
to expect."

The JAE has been launched by a US and UK academic
partnership with the goal of widening international debate about the
moral status of animals, and is the result of years of collaboration
between the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the University of
Illinois Press. It is edited by the internationally known theologian the
Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of the Oxford Centre for
Animal Ethics, and Professor Priscilla Cohn, Emeritus Professor of
Philosophy at Penn State University and Associate Director of the Centre.